Thursday, February 13, 2014

(Tegucigalpa) – Honduran authorities have
failed to investigate properly a wave of killings and other abuses
believed to be tied to land disputes in the Bajo Aguán region, Human
Rights Watch said in a report released today.

“Even in a country afflicted by alarming levels of violence and impunity, the situation in Bajo Aguán stands out,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco,
Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “The failure to take
rudimentary steps to bring those responsible to justice has helped
perpetuate a climate of lawlessness in which more crimes are likely to
occur, and has deepened public distrust of the authorities.”

Not one of the 29 homicides documented by Human Rights Watch in Bajo
Aguán has led to a conviction, according to information provided by
government officials. Only one case went to trial – the November 2010
killing of five campesinos, or small-scale farmers. It was
provisionally dismissed in January 2013, pending the discovery of more
evidence, after the judge found insufficient grounds to proceed, and has
not resumed.

The Bajo Aguán region of northern Honduras has
been the setting for long-running, often violent land disputes, many
stemming from changes to the country’s agrarian law in 1992. Large
tracts of territory in the region have been contested between campesino groups
and agro-industrial businesses that mostly cultivate African palm oil.
According to a report by the National Human Rights Commissioner of
Honduras, 92 people were killed in the land disputes in Bajo Aguán from
2009 to 2012. While the majority of the victims have been campesinos, security guards employed by private firms have also been killed.

In cases in which evidence suggested that soldiers and police in Bajo
Aguán committed human rights violations, investigators failed to carry
out basic steps to determine whether abuses had occurred, Human Rights
Watch found. In cases in which evidence suggested that security forces
carried out torture and arbitrary arrests, prosecutors did not examine
crime scenes or interview witnesses and suspects. Authorities also
delayed searching for missing people who, evidence suggests, were
abducted, even when evidence pointed to locations where they might be
found. In one of these cases reviewed by Human Rights Watch, the victim
was later found dead, while two are still missing.

A lack of transparency on the part of police and prosecutors about the
status of pending investigations keeps victims’ families in the dark and
undermines confidence in the justice system, Human Rights Watch said.
Together with lack of progress on prosecuting suspects for these crimes,
these factors create a vicious cycle, discouraging people from coming
forward with leads that could help bring those responsible to justice.

In 13 of the 29 killings and an abduction Human Rights Watch
investigated, evidence suggests the possible involvement of private
security guards. Private guards are subject to national laws on the use
of force and are obliged to respect the rights of citizens.
Investigations into cases in which victims said private guards were
involved were plagued by errors and omissions, such as prosecutors’
failure to requisition work records that would indicate which guards
were on duty when a crime occurred.

The alleged involvement of security guards working for agro-industrial
businesses in Bajo Aguán in abuses linked to land disputes prompted an
investigation by the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC)
accountability mechanism – the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO) – into
the IFC’s lending to Dinant Corporation.

The IFC, the private sector lending arm of the World Bank Group, has
rules regarding its clients’ hiring, deployment, and supervision of
private security, particularly in the face of credible allegations of
abuse. Dinant Corporation told Human Rights Watch it carries out
internal investigations into all reports of abuse involving its
personnel and cooperates fully with the authorities in relation to any
criminal allegations.

The World Bank Group ombudsman’s report, made public in January 2014,
found serious problems with how the IFC staff had handled the situation,
including underestimating risks related to security and land conflicts,
and failing to undertake adequate due diligence even though the
situation around the project and the risks had been raised publicly. Nor
did IFC project staff inform other IFC specialists on such
environmental and social risks about the problems that they knew were
occurring, the report concluded. The IFC has publicly acknowledged that
there were shortcomings in the IFC’s implementation of its own standards.

The general lack of progress in investigations in Bajo Aguán has
exacerbated distrust of the government and fear among the region’s
population, particularly among campesino groups.

During his administration, from 2010 to 2013, President Porfirio Lobo
made some efforts to mitigate land disputes in Bajo Aguán through
mediation and land purchases. But his administration’s predominant
strategy for dealing with the violence in the region was to deploy
additional security forces and blame criminal groups for the violence –
an approach that failed to reduce crime or to improve accountability.

The Lobo administration also failed to take preventive steps to protect
people at risk related to land disputes in Bajo Aguán, even in cases in
which the evidence suggested violence was likely to occur. In at least
two instances since 2010, people were killed who had previously been
granted formal “precautionary measures” by the Inter-American Commission
on Human Rights for their activities related to Bajo Aguán, which had
instructed the Honduran government to provide the individuals with
immediate protection. The victims were a journalist and a campesino
activist. In a third case, a human rights lawyer was killed who had
been promised protection by the Honduran government. None of the three
victims were receiving government protection at the time they were
killed, Human Rights Watch found.

In other instances of credible threats to communities or individuals,
officials have neither investigated nor offered effective protection
measures. In several instances in 2013, military officials in the region
exacerbated the risk to particular activists working in Bajo Aguán by
smearing them and questioning the credibility of their work.

“The new Hernández government has the opportunity to break with its
predecessors’ failure to get to the bottom of the killings and abuses in
Bajo Aguán,” Vivanco said. “If the administration doesn’t make a
serious effort from day one to investigate these crimes, the devastating
cycle of violence in the Aguán will persist.”

Human Rights Watch urged Honduran authorities to:

Set up a special unit with a multi-year mandate composed of
prosecutors, police, and investigators to conduct prompt, thorough, and
impartial investigations into homicides, abductions, and other serious
crimes in Bajo Aguán in which evidence suggests a connection to the land
conflict, as well as all cases of alleged human rights violations by
authorities in Bajo Aguán.

Strengthen mechanisms and accompanying legislation to provide timely,
effective protection to individuals or groups at risk of violence in the
land conflict, particularly human rights defenders, journalists, and
members of campesino organizations who have received repeated threats.

Ensure that private security firms are registered with the government,
and that lists of personnel employed and firearms possessed by private
security firms are up-to-date, in accordance with national laws.

Examples of cases from the report of flawed
investigations into killings, lack of accountability for human rights
abuses by government security forces, and inadequate protection measures
for those at risk:

Five members of the Movimiento Campesino del Aguán (Peasant Movement
of the Aguán, or MCA) were killed during a confrontation over land at El
Tumbador plantation on November 15, 2010. Charges against five private
security guards were provisionally dismissed during a trial in which
prosecutors failed to collect key evidence, including ballistics tests
on weapons allegedly used in the incident and a full inventory of
weapons assigned to guards.

Gregorio Chávez, a farmer and lay preacher, disappeared on July 2,
2012, near his house in the Panamá community. Police did not search a
plantation next to his property for days after his disappearance, losing
a critical opportunity to collect evidence. When police eventually
searched the plantation on July 6, they found Chávez’s body. No one has
been charged in the case.

Santos Bernabé Cruz – then aged 16, and the son of the leader of a campesino group
– reported that he was arbitrarily detained by police on September 19,
2011, and accused of participating in an attack that resulted in the
death of a policeman, a crime in which he denied taking part. Cruz said
that police beat him with helmets, whipped him with a hose, jumped up
and down on his body while he was on the ground, then doused him
in gasoline and told him they would burn him alive if he did not
confess. He said the police held him incommunicado in detention
overnight, and then released him the following day without charge. The
criminal investigation into the abuses is stalled.

On September 22, 2012, gunmen ambushed and killed a human rights
lawyer, Antonio Trejo, in Tegucigalpa as he stood outside a church.
Three days after his death, the minister of justice and human rights
acknowledged that Trejo had told the government he feared for his life
due to threats, and said the government had provided him with “special
security measures.” However, the next day, a spokesman for the Security
Ministry said that Trejo had not received any protection through the
ministry, as far as he had been able to determine. No one has been
charged with Trejo’s killing, which is still under investigation.

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